Unlike some new features for Google Apps, these are available right now in Gmail, though all three remain off by default.
To enable the popular “Send and Archive,” which turns the Send button into a dual-function button that sends your reply and then archives the conversation, head to settings and look for the new “Show ‘Send & Archive’ button in reply” option. While you’re in Gmail’s settings you can also change the default reply mode to reply all, though frankly that seems like asking for trouble.
The quote selected text feature is not a setting, it’s just the new behavior for replying to messages. Select a block of text in an e-mail, click reply and only the selected text will be included in your reply.
Code hosting giant GitHub has added a small but significant new feature to the site: the ability to create new files through the web interface. The change makes it easier for non-Git-savvy contributors to quickly and easily add files to a repository.
You’ll find the new file creation tool just to the left of a repository’s breadcrumb menu. Click the new “New File” icon and GitHub will create a new file, ask you to name it and open it in the file editor — all right within your web browser.
Couple the new file creation tool with Git’s existing on-site document editor and you have the plain-text aficionado’s alternative to online editing suites like Google Docs or Microsoft’s Office 365.
At the very least the ability to create new documents through the web interface makes GitHub a more full-featured blogging engine for anyone using Jekyll, Hyde or other static site generators in conjunction with GitHub.
The new file creation tool is smart too. If you try to create a new file in a repository that you don’t have access to, GitHub will automatically fork the project and help you send a pull request to the original repository with your new file (much like it does when you edit a file through the web interface).
You can also do a bit of URL hacking to automatically create new files. Just add ?filename=yournewfile.txt at the end of the URL and GitHub will pre-fill the filename field with yournewfile.txt.
GitHub has also launched a new status site to report the current network health of the site. Should you for some reason not be able to connect to GitHub you can check the new status page to see if GitHub is down or if the problem is on your end. There’s also a new @githubstatus Twitter account you can follow for updates.
Google’s demo site, served entirely by Google Drive. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey
Google has unveiled a new feature dubbed “site publishing” for the company’s Drive cloud hosting service. Drive’s new site publishing is somewhere between a full-featured static file hosting service like Amazon S3 and Dropbox’s public folders, which can make hosted files available on the web.
Google has set up a simple demo site served entirely from Google Drive to give you an idea of what’s possible with the site publishing feature. Essentially site publishing gives your public folders a URL on the web — anything you drop in that folder can then be referenced relative to the root URL. It’s unclear from the announcement how these new features fit with Google’s existing answer to Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage.
The API behind site publishing works a lot like what you’ll find in Amazon’s S3 offering. If you use the Drive API’s files.insert method to upload a file to Drive, it will return a webViewLink attribute, something like https://googledrive.com/host/A1B2C3D4E5F6G7H8J. That ugly, but functional URL becomes the base URL for your content. So, if you uploaded a folder named images, with a file named kittens.jpg, you could access it on the web at https://googledrive.com/host/A1B2C3D4E5F6G7H8J/images/kittens.jpg
There’s one drawback though, Drive’s site publishing doesn’t appear to support custom domains, which means it works fine for assets like images, CSS or JavaScript, but unless you don’t mind serving your site from some funky URLs, it’s probably not the best choice for hosting an entire site.
There are already numerous static file hosting solutions on the web including Dropbox and Amazon’s S3, as well as whole publishing systems that use Dropbox and S3 to host files, but for those who would prefer a Google-based solution, now you have it.
That means you can attach files up to 10GB in size, which is some 400 times larger than what Gmail will allow you to do with typical e-mail attachments. Of course the reason files can be so large is that Google isn’t actually sending the files; it’s merely sending a link to your recipients who can then access them through Google Drive.
Gmail has a clever new feature that checks to make sure that all your recipients actually have permission to view your Drive files. The feature works a bit like Gmail’s forgotten-attachment detector — if you forgot to grant permission to one of your recipients Gmail will prompt you to do so before sending your e-mail.
Like most new features from Google, the new Google Drive integration will be rolling out to Gmail users “over the next few days.” Note that in order to get the new Google Drive attachments feature you’ll need to opt-in to the new compose window option we wrote about earlier (see that post for full details on how to get started with Gmail’s new in-window compose dialog).
The move makes WordPress one of the largest, most reputable online services to accept the fledgling Bitcoin currency.
Bitcoin is an online currency that allows buyers and sellers to exchange money anonymously. According to a post on the WordPress blog, the appeal of Bitcoin for WordPress is that, unlike credit cards and PayPal, “Bitcoin has no central authority and no way to lock entire countries out of the network … merchants who accept Bitcoin payments can do business with anyone.”
The anonymous aspect has made Bitcoin a target for law enforcement agencies, but for WordPress it means that users living in any of the over 60 countries currently blocked by PayPal (and many credit card companies) now have a way to pay for WordPress upgrades and services.
While setting up a basic blog on WordPress.com is free, there are paid upgrades available for custom themes, custom domains or to remove ads from your site.
Bitcoin is in your WordPress. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.
Automattic, WordPress’ parent company, accepts Bitcoin payments through Bitpay.com, which has now been integrated into the WordPress.com payment interface alongside the PayPal and traditional credit card options. WordPress is foregoing the Bitcoin “confirmations” process, which would help protect the company against fraud. Here’s an explanation from the FAQ:
We could wait for the first confirmation (typically 5-10 minutes) but we prefer to make the customer experience as smooth as possible. Making you wait for confirmations would virtually eliminate our risk but we’re confident that with digital products like ours the risk is already acceptably low.
Note that while WordPress is accepting Bitcoin payments, it may not work for everything just yet. The option to pay with Bitcoin appears to be limited to upgrade bundles at the moment. Purchasing custom themes or domains by themselves is not currently possible due to what WordPress calls “technical complications.”
WordPress adopting Bitcoin is good news for users in countries like Haiti, Ethiopia, or Kenya, which are often blocked by traditional payment systems. It’s also good news for Bitcoin supporters who now have another, very large, every legitimate company on their side.
Google has graduated three popular Gmail Labs tools to proper Gmail features: reply to all, quote selected text and, the most useful of the bunch, the “Send and Archive” button.
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